I pull Natalia against me and inhale the rose and sugar scent of her hair.
I don’t mind it when my wife is angry at me, I decide. Not if I still get to hold her like this, and to know that she’s mine.
“Thank you,” I murmur against her ear. “For understanding. Even if you hate me for now.”
Natalia is silent for a moment, just breathing with me. Then she pulls back and strokes her fingers over my jaw, those green eyes liquid. “I’m sorry for what happened to you, Leks. I had no idea.”
39
NATALIA
Ithink I get it now.
Why Leks craves control in the bedroom, even as he treats me like something precious and breakable.
It’s because he was never given that choice.
“Tell me what to do,” I whisper against his neck.
I breathe in his strong, masculine scent. It’s just us here in the garden. A few of Leks’s men guard the house out front, but we haven’t hired any servants yet. I’ve never felt so much freedom at home and it’s intoxicating.
“Whatever you want.”
His eyes flash and he brings a hand to run the strap of my cami between his fingers.
“Take this off.” His voice drops into a husky growl.
I pull the silk singlet over my head, leaving me just in a miniskirt on Leks’s lap in the garden.
“You’re so fucking perfect.”
His grip on me tightens. With one hand, hepins both of my wrists behind my back. My back arches and my nipples scrape against him.
“You remember your safe word,zolotse?”
I nod.Cherry blossom.
“Those trees were everywhere in this garden on the day we married.” At the height of summer now, the blossoms in the garden have turned to leaves. “I knew two things then. That you were the most irresistible woman I’d ever seen. And that you would never, ever want me.”
“Wrong,” I murmur against his jaw before I press a kiss to his neck. “You were wrong about me, Leks.”
His lips draw a trail all the way down the side of my neck, my shoulder, my waist.
“I was so fucking wrong. Even when you had given me everything.”
It hurt, that he would think so little of me. That he really saw me as the spoiled heiress who was incapable of dealing with his problems.
We both had wrong ideas about each other. Even when he was so different from the story I’d been told, I still thought the worst. It took me time to learn that Leks was everything I thought he wasn’t.
A killer, but not cold-blooded.
“You know who I am now,” I tell him. “And I know you, too.”
His lips curve into a smile that makes my heart thud in an unsteady rhythm. His hand wraps around my throat in a squeeze that sends a rush of moisture between my legs.
“Oh I know who you are, Natalia. And I know exactly what you’re craving.”
He grabs my hips, his fingers leaving indents in my flesh, and he pulls me tight against the growing bulge in his pants.
